“A Bakery Gets Sweet Returns From Social-Media Blitz”

Posted by joe

We are seeing more examples of businesses that are effectively leveraging social media that works with customers. This article describes a New York City baker that has found success — and almost 3000 likes on Facebook. This short article “A Bakery Gets Sweet Returns From Social-Media Blitz” (Wall Street Journal, February 14, 2011, non-subscribers may need to click here) offers examples and qualifies the example by suggesting that bars and restaurants may be special cases with social media.

What do you think? What other small businesses might be able to take advantage of social media? How? Offer some examples.

I think that social media websites are awesome because an online presence is everything now. To get people aware of you it is important to have search engine optimization (SEO) and these social networking and media websites help with get SEO without having to pay a large fee. Something that is nice and the reason why there are increases in business for these companies using the online resources is that they are not time consuming to post things to keep your customers updates. Facebook is an awesome example of exposure to trends. If you notice when a celebrity is big there are more fans on those pages because they want to stay up to date on the latest gossip or action. Using these websites helps people more and more gain access to the growth in online communication and exposure. I am happy small businesses can somewhat compete with the large corporations with these websites because they are what keeps our economy thriving.

I certainly agree that in today’s business world, it sure seems like an online presence is a necessity. I like that this article points out what types of business’ benefit most from it (bars and restaurants). I see a lot of business’ that do participate in online social media but they either don’t put much effort into updating it or they simply create it and then never use it. I find this frustrating in the sense that if they feel like it is necessary to create a profile, they should also see the reasoning to actually use it to further their business.
I really like the Spot Dessert Bar’s strategy of providing laptops and ipads with orders so that customers have the option of right then and there stating their opinion and spreading news about this business. This catches the customer while they are hopefully still being satisfied by the service/products so Spot Desserts can expect great opinions about their business. I haven’t seen this strategy implemented by other business’ yet.
I close with my opinion that yes some business’ are built for online social media and can greatly benefit from it as long as they put forth the effort to truly utilize it such as Spot Desserts. Other business’ that may have a different cliental or product/service might be better served focusing their marketing elsewhere.

I agree that social media has made a huge impact on advertising and promotion within businesses. But I agree with Bradley’s comment that it might work really well for some but not very well for others. The restaurant I work for has started a Facebook page (which doesn’t get much attention) mainly because our clientel are older and either apart of the late majority or laggard group who don’t understand or care to understand social media sites. The article makes a point that social media is best used when you can update events/promos on the site but it can’t be the only way the company advertises. I’m a big supporter of e-mail coupons and personal selling myself, I may be the only one, but I’ve never gone to a businesses Facebook page to look for deals. Who knows, maybe I should start!

If a business can take advantage of a social network site…more power to them! The technology is there so why not use it. If a business is struggling and the conventional (ie: coupons, flyers, print ads, etc.) marketing strategy isn’t working then sites such as facebook, twitter and the like are a great way to get your name out there. I plan to start a small business and one of the first advertising methods I will use is social networking. Like good, old-fashioned “word of mouth”…only in hyper-drive.